Report on Citizenship Law: Nepal 5. Current political debates and reform plans Citizenship was one of the contentious issues extensively deliberated upon during the constitution-making process. The high-level task force constituted under the first CA recommended restricting citizenship by descent by requiring both parents to be Nepalese citizens for their child to be eligible to acquire the citizenship of Nepal. 81 This drew immediate dissent from many CA members, particularly the women members. Consequently, the CA could not agree on the citizenship provision and it was categorised as a disputed issue after the first CA was dissolved. A second CA was formed on 21 January 2014. Among several committees formed under the CA, the Constitution Records Study and Determination Committee (CRSDC) was tasked with classifying the settled and disputed issues. The settled issues were to be submitted to the Constitution Drafting Committee (CDC) and the disputed issues were to be submitted to the Constitutional and Political Dialogue and Consensus Committee (CPDCC) in order to garner consensus. Despite being categorised amongst the disputed issues by the first CA, the CPDCC identified the citizenship provisions as a settled issue and forwarded them to the CDC on 13 May 2014, thereby preventing deliberations on them. However, on 6 August 6 2014, the subcommittee of the CDC requested that the citizenship provisions be sent to the CPDCC for further discussion. A sub-committee of the CPDCC then identified citizenship as an issue that required further discussion and the result was substantive discussion in the CPDCC as well. Parallel to the formal constitution-making process, civil society organisations, activists and persons without citizenship had been staging a series of protests in the streets of the capital. Protests were also organised at the district level. The civil society organisations repeatedly put forth their demands for equal rights for men and women in conferring citizenship to their children and spouses. More specifically, there was a demand to amend “Father AND Mother” to “Father OR Mother,” which would enable acquisition of citizenship through mothers in the same way as through fathers. A month after the 2015 earthquake, the four top political parties adopted a 16-point agreement resulting in consensus on all the contentious issues. The citizenship provision remained unchanged and the restrictive “Father AND Mother” provision was included in the preliminary draft of the constitution. The draft was then subjected to public scrutiny, which revealed massive support for the “Father OR Mother” provision. The CA was finally compelled to amend the citizenship provision. 5.1 Lack of Citizenship Certificate A study conducted by the Forum for Women, Law and Development (FWLD) showed that 4,346,046 people (23.65 per-cent of the population) lacked citizenship certificates in Nepal. An update of the study in 2015 reveals that the number of people without citizenship certificates had increased from 4.3 million to 4.6 million. However, the percentage had decreased from 23.65% to 22.82% largely thanks to special efforts made in 2013 in which the 81 Review of the High Level Taskforce Proposal on Citizenship, page 1. RSCAS/GLOBALCIT-CR 2017/8 - © 2017 Author 15